


Like Oil and Water

by Inksinger



Series: On Azerothian Soil [9]
Category: World of Warcraft
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-27
Updated: 2013-10-27
Packaged: 2017-12-30 14:37:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1019837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inksinger/pseuds/Inksinger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lor'themar discovers why it's a terrible, terrible thing for Rommath and Halduron to work together cooperatively.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like Oil and Water

There were several very good reasons, Halduron mused, why one should never mix a night of heavy drinking, rich food, and bloodthistle smoke with a pair of hot tempered political rivals and a devious Regent Lord with far too little else with which to entertain himself. For one thing, such a combination tended to make for a very tense atmosphere at dinner and very jumpy dinner guests and servants; for another, Halduron had never known Lor'themar to ever suggest something that ended well when he was drunk and sucking on his fourth pipe of Farstrider's Lament (so named, Halduron often commented, because no one was happy to run out of it).

The third very good reason for never indulging himself until his senses were blurred and his inhibitions demolished was undoubtedly the head of ink-black hair he saw resting on his chest when he awoke the next morning... or, more importantly, exactly _who's_ head of hair it was, and why the older man was in bed with Halduron when they were both naked and covered in angry red nail- and bitemarks.

The Ranger General's latest new bedmate was immediately recognizable by the brilliant scarlet tattoos across his arms and torso--marks that stood out starkly against the pale canvas they had been etched into. Halduron glared balefully at the lines now as his head began to pound with the makings of a blistering hangover. He was suffering enough already; he didn't need the identity of his latest partner weighing on his already aching shoulders.

With practiced ease, the blond slid carefully out from under his bedmate, who didn't stir or give any sign at all that he noticed his pillow had slipped out from under him. Halduron turned towards the bathroom--oh, by the Light, _why_ had they slept in his own rooms?!--then stopped and, with a grimace, turned back around to flick the blankets over the crass, nude figure sprawled wantonly across his bed. Just because he hadn't been sober enough to qualify as a consenting participant, Halduron saw no reason not to be a gentleman all the same.

And... perhaps when the other man woke up, he would feel less inclined to try setting his younger compatriot ablaze if he came to his senses with his dignity still somewhat intact.

Halduron shook his head and ran a hand through his messy, matted hair (evidently it had been caught in the knots his partner had tied around his hands at some point) as the bathroom door slid shut, placing a heavy--though still flammable--barrier between him and his latest bed-warmer. He was going to _murder_ Lor'themar for this--right after he was done torching the rest of the 'rare and exotic' brand of whiskey he'd tricked his two advisors into drinking with him!

Considering the apparently rough night he had drunkenly enjoyed with a man he could only very rarely get along with, Halduron saw it only fitting to treat himself to what he would otherwise find to be a very indulgently long, scented bath, the majority of which he spent simply soaking himself up to his neck and idly contemplating drowning himself before the man in the other room was able to burn the door down and boil him alive... or before anyone came in and saw his entirely unwanted guest in the Ranger General's bed, especially if that someone happened to be Lor'themar or Liadrin--the latter having momentarily returned to the capital, as she often did, on business.

Suddenly drowning himself didn't seem like such a bad idea...

Halduron was still plotting his revenge on Lor'themar about an hour later, after having finally dragged himself out of his bath and wrestling every last knot and snag out of his poor hair. Dressed now in what his colleagues might call 'civilian's attire'--consisting mainly of a simple cotton tunic and brown trousers, both of which hid flat, lethally sharp knives that he could draw in the space of a millisecond at need--the elf stepped almost reluctantly back into his rooms... and stopped dead, staring first at his now frighteningly empty bed and then glancing sharply about the rest of his room, scanning every conceivable hiding place for any sign of the likely incredibly vexed mage before his common sense kicked in again.

He was dealing with a mage--albeit a very powerful mage infamous throughout Quel'thalas for his short fuse and lasting grudges, but a mage all the same. If there was anything Halduron knew about mages (and he was proud to say that what little knowledge he possessed of them was only acquired out of stark necessity), it was that they rarely hid, say, behind desks or in the darkest corner of a very large bedroom when they were angry enough to attack. True, they preferred distance--usually--but most of the ones he knew seemed the type to want their unfortunate victims to see exactly who was responsible for setting them ablaze, freezing them with ice, impaled them with a basically-animated banner post... The man who had vanished from the room was rather the epitome of that trait, at least as far as Halduron could tell.

In any event, his overnight guest was gone and it was probably safe to assume they wouldn't cross paths again today unless duty demanded otherwise of them. Even so... Halduron took several hours more before he stopped assuming every out-of-place sound or flicker of color was a certain ill-tempered magister, lurking in his peripheral and readying a spell to send the Ranger General spiraling backside-first into the Twisting Nether, likely to be sodomized by demons...

~~~

Grand Magister Rommath was in an even fouler temper than usual, and those very, _very_ few who dared to cross paths with him as he stalked the Spire's halls were sent away with scorched hair and clothes and a reaffirmed fear of the prickly man, who--though he outwardly appeared simply irritable--was far too busy mentally shrieking over the scene he had opened his eyes to only hours before.

 _Brightwing's bed chamber!_ his mind kept howling. _You slept in Brightwing's Voided bed chamber!_

At least the blond buffoon had thought him still fast asleep when he'd left to tend to his dubious hygiene. As a matter of fact, he had been _well_ awake when Halduron had slipped away, and had gathered his clothing and as much of his battered dignity as could be recovered before fleeing the Ranger General's rooms only moments after his sensitive (and bite-sore) ears had detected the sound of a bath being drawn.

This was all Lor'themar's doing, Rommath had come to decide. If the man had not _insisted_ upon his two 'closest friends' sharing that accursed bottle of whiskey with him during dessert, they none of them would have become so inebriated as to take full leave of their senses. The Regent Lord himself had eventually staggered away to his rooms, chuckling drunkenly as he bounced between the walls and guards of the Spire. As for Rommath and his river-swimming, muck-wallowing compatriot...

The magister grimaced, feeling momentarily ill at the foggy half-images that flickered lazily through his mind. _Some_ memories were better left to decay and fade into oblivion--much as a certain pair of fair-haired elves would be blasted to oblivion should they either of them try to approach him for the rest of the day, necessity or not!

One of the Spire runners--a young thing, pretty in a rather plain way and likely only here at all because one of the older runners had an eye for plain, pretty blondes--trotted past the brooding Grand Magister in near silence. Near, for while her feet made no sound as she went, the girl could not _quite_ stifle a snicker, even when she brought a hand up to hide the helpless grin spreading across her face. As Rommath turned to glare after her, he caught two of the Spire's guards biting the insides of their cheeks in a rather _noticeable_ attempt to avoid grinning... though at least they had the decency to pale and move out of the Grand Magister's line of sight once they realized he was looking at them.

Lovely. It seemed either a certain pale-maned elf had let something unsavory slip, or else he and Halduron hadn't waited to reach the latter's rooms before proceeding to make utter fools of themselves. Rommath was rather more content to believe the former--for one thing, what was left of his pride would not survive the reality that he had engaged in such slovenly behavior in public; for another, he now had an excellent reason to track Lor'themar down and make his morning just as miserable as it turned out for everyone else!

~~~

Lor'themar was never happy to wake up to a blistering hangover--the skull-shattering headaches, the often unpredictably explosive nausea, and the extreme sensitivity to light and sound were rather worse wake-up calls even than getting ambushed alone in the middle of the night by a band of savage, severely antipathetic trolls--but this morning in particular he awoke feeling worse than he could recall ever feeling in recent years, and groaned as he buried his face in his hands.

"So the whiskey bit you, too," Halduron's voice commented from somewhere nearby. Lor'themar groaned again as his friend's voice caused a chain explosion to go off behind his eye and through his eye socket.

"Funny," Rommath's voice came in, also very nearby and triggering another chain explosion. "For all your groaning, I daresay you aren't suffering _nearly_ as much as Halduron and I have been for the past several hours."

"What are you...?" Lor'themar trailed off as he finally opened his eye... and beheld a world turned quite literally upside-down. At roughly the same time that he noticed that the floor was now a foot or so _above_ his head, the severely hungover elf began to register an odd, very uncomfortable pull on both of his ankles, as well as an uncomfortably irregular, hard surface pressing against his back.

When he looked... up along the length of his body (and was rewarded with a particularly blinding flare of pain), he saw that he was tied to the dresser across his bedroom from the window. He now dangled from his ankles, which were tightly-bound with a thick, soft-textured rope that appeared to have been removed from the heavy curtains that now hung loose over the aforementioned window... and Rommath and Halduron--neither of whom appeared to have entirely come out of their own hangovers--were standing in front of him, glaring down at him and looking as though they'd like nothing more than to strangle him.

Maybe it was the fact that Halduron and Rommath were standing in the same room and had yet to start bickering; maybe it was the fact that neither looked at all inclined to get him down from his predicament. Whatever the catalyst was, somehow Lor'themar's highly-tuned ranger's senses managed to cut through his mind-shattering headache long enough to tell the pale-haired elf that he was probably in a great deal of trouble with his two advisors. Unfortunately, the pain swamped him again before those same instincts could warn him not to try talking his way out of his predicament.

"If this is about last night," Lor'themar said with a feeble glare of his own, "I fail to see how you can find me at fault. When I left the two of you, I feel fairly certain you were still glaring daggers at each other across the table..." He trailed off, watching with a growing sense of dread as Rommath's eyebrows slowly rose to met his hairline and Halduron leaned back ever so slightly on his heels.

"So how do you know anything else happened after that?" Halduron asked. "Unless, of course, you were _hoping_ something more would happen."

"You've been asleep until now," Rommath reminded Lor'themar. His eyes seemed to twinkle with the sort of gleeful spite he usually treated Aethas to whenever the younger man said something particularly naïve. "You could not have heard any guards or message runners whispering about _last night_. How, then, do you know anything happened for which we _might_ hold you accountable?"

They had him there. Were he in a better state of health, Lor'themar might still have tried to talk around the whole thing, convince the two very unhappy elves before him that he had done nothing more than supply them with good drink--but as it was, his head was beginning to feel like a rapidly-swelling balloon, throbbing more and more painfully until he was sure it would soon pop off of his neck and go ricocheting through the room. Under such duress, his normally keen sense of defiance was... less than keen. The shock of fear as first Rommath, then Halduron turned to leave with what he assumed were identically vicious smirks didn't help matters any.

"Surely you don't plan to _leave_ me here?" Lor'themar demanded, giving an experimental twist with one leg and finding the rope snugly tied. "This is a bit overkill even for last night, isn't it?"

"Oh, I'm sure you can get yourself down from there," Halduron said over his shoulder. "After all, we left your hands undone."

"I have several very important meetings today!" Lor'themar yelled after his first attempt to drag himself up and untie himself failed miserably. "And the first of them is in an hour!"

"Then I suggest you hurry," Rommath told him. "It wouldn't do to keep the blacksmiths' guild waiting, after all."

He and Halduron shut the doors to Lor'themar's rooms exactly three seconds before the man began cursing them in every language he knew. The two shared a very, very rare look of mutual triumph with each other, then turned and went their separate ways without a word or backward glance--until the tell-tale crash of something heavy falling to the floor urged them off around their respective corners before Lor'themar could pick himself up and come after them.

**Author's Note:**

> Birthday present for archmage_proudmoore on tumblr.


End file.
